Towards a culturally independent participatory design method: Fusing game elements into the design process

Historically, Participatory Design (PD) was introduced and applied in the Scandinavian and American context as a practical design method for collective creativity and stakeholder involvement. In this paper, by fusing game elements into PD, we suggest a first step towards a culturally independent PD method called the ICT Service Design Game to ease the prevailing concern that PD has limited applicability in other cultural settings. We conduct four experiments on ICT Service Design Game in Scandinavia and Asia to evaluate its feasibility. The experiments identify some differences in the PD process and the created Persona characteristics, probably due to cultural differences. Of more interestingly, despite these process differences, the game elements of our PD variant were found to promote the key values of PD in culturally diverse settings by stimulating idea creation and participation. Our experiments imply that the introduction of game elements allows PD to be effectively utilized in culturally diverse settings.